00individual had creative ways to express his teenage angst. Subtlety was key, rebellious outbursts only alerted the authorities as to who was trouble, whereas rebellion that slowly builds from within creates an ongoing and more sincere satisfying mode of rebellion and covert action.

Within the confines of a classroom on any given day, some teenagers find it maddening to be chained to a desk and chair for nearly an hour per class – for a teenager this is torture.
So, to maintain his cool 00individual began in 1967 to write, doodle and paint, – tape, mutate, and abuse, – befriend, respect, and cherish his binder for the entire three years of high school – 10th, 11th, 12th grades – as teen-age rebellion against, well, buying a new one every year.

00individual’s Westchester High School 3-Ring Binder shows a random array of artists and bands that were popular over that very potent three year period. Etched in ballpoint pen for the archives are the names discernible and barely: Eric Burdon and the Animals, The Music Machine, The Who, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Kinks, The Doors, Them, Bob Dylan, The Nashville Teens, Herman’s Hermits, The Seeds, Jay and the Americans, Dick Dale, Roger Miller, The Stones, The Kingsmen, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Yardbirds, The Ventures, The Marketts, The Byrds, The Young Rascals, The Standells, The Beau Brummels, The Guess Who?, Jan and Dean, We 5, and The Beach Boys.

There’s a gold sticker from 00individual’s St. George drum kit, Dymo 3D orange plastic embossed tape “D.H.D”, for the “Dirty Half Dozen”, (a band of six guys, 00individual included, whose dirty deeds of mischievousness got them into trouble), also in orange embossed tape is “My Dog”; the answer when the “I Like” tab is lifted, a Batman logo, and a Psychedelic Freak Out above 007 at the top and the Badyear blimp. The S.M.A. stood for everything conceivable from Suck My Ass to Shanghaied Magic Aspirin, and the requisite “girlfriend’s name on stuff” is blurred for anonymity. The surfer painted in model oil paints is of the “Hot Curl” MPC model kit character, and the sidewalk surfer is a 00individual original design influenced by Rick Griffin’s “Murphy” and Ed Big Daddy Roth’s “Weird-Ohs Monsters”.

Even though Westchester High was the last school of the L.A. City School District to finally drop the archaic Code of Dress, (and only after 00individual had graduated), while he was there he was part of an underlying “new code” that could not be regulated or enforced, and that was the exploration of the new world that his head was experiencing that Marijuana had opened.

Right at the beginning there was an Occult/secret knowledge feel among those few who had been “experienced”, they had gained a knowledge that connected them in a cosmic fun way. Knowing glances in the school’s hallways, secret meetings to exchange goods, clandestine meeting places to get high; the whole scene was very cool, and a balancing act between the new world and the old world – between the life among the “straights” and a life among “kindred spirits”.

They were seeing school and the world through a new lens, literally – as sunglasses avoided many “stoned faces don’t lie” situations, and figuratively – as seeing reality clearly for the first time.
That’s the tricky part about gaining awareness; once your consciousness is raised, it can never be lowered.

High school will forever be a place of 1) honing one’s social skills, 2) seriously preparing for a specific career and getting good grades, 3) prep for a potential scholarship in sports, or 4) getting by as best as one can. 00individual was part of the first and last group. He knew that institutionalized education was not for him, he knew that nothing other than a few academic facts and decent social skills were all that were really needed, for with his new sense of self he was empowered and ready to enter real life and the job market.

However, he gave West L.A. Junior College (built on M.G.M.’s Back-lot 3) a half-semester shot, but left when the opportunity for a job in an art department supplanted the need for college.
At eighteen in 1969 he moved out of the home he grew up in and began to continue his life’s education in the real world.

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Thanks to some unknown inherent ability, 00individual was able to have the foresight, and in most cases some sort of outside protection and preservation, to be able to retain key artifacts over the decades that are representative of the Era and the Vibe of the ’60’s and of the ’70’s.

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